Who has developed 'apps' that allow (or would allow) people around the world to declare known deaths related to Covid-19, independantly of the infamous "tracking" systems?
I would expect that this is already being done in some countries (e.g., Brazil)? If so, are there ways that it might be done in a concerted and more visible way (without being pirated by the GAFA & Co., or worse)?
The data quality would certainly be controversial, but this would be an interesting social as well as statistical process...
One of the benefits of such initiatives (that could be seen as contributions to "citizens' science), would be to counter-act the systematic incompleteness and distorsion, already visible since February 2020, in the way that the counting of "confirmed" infection cases and of "deaths" (in hospitals) and of numbers in "intensive care" (again, almost exclusively in hospitals), has crowded out the wider observation of the epidemic and its effects.
There is a flagrant phenomenon of statistical "horse and rabbit stew", which is relayed in permanence as a sort of journalistic schizophrenia.
-- The "confirmed" infections, intensive care, deaths (etc.) numbers are given, day by day, with a spurious 7 significant figure format; and
-- These super-precise institutional figures are, through the media, assorted with occasional commentaries and sporadic articles to the effect that the real figures are "almost certainly" (sic) much higher .... because of uncounted deaths in old peoples' homes, because of 'unconfirmed' deaths in the community, etc., etc.
The fact that the "real" figures are CERTAINLY much higher than the "official" (sic) institutional statistics, is the rather obvious elephant in the room. Everybody knows! How can it be that, even after 3 months of continuous journalistic (and scientific) attention, there is still little more than false pudeur about the "difficulty" of getting the "true" numbers, about the need to look at the month-by-month trends of "excess mortality", and so on?
The answer to this question is certainly to be sought, and found, at the level of institutional/ideological factors that are generating and maintaining (1) the "invisibility" of the deaths that are not administered by national health services and, as a corollary, (2) the invisibility of the "gap" between the official numbers and the 'true' facts. So, why not help the work of the Hegelian tribunal of history, to unmask these distorsions, using social networking in order to build "citizens' data bases in resistance to the zealous over-administration practiced by State apparatus, declaring known deaths related to Covid-19 in an autonomous and collectively responsible way?
What would be the dangers of producing and sharing personal data linked to deaths, grief, sadness and vulnerability, in this way?